The Hitler chap­ter in Churchill’s book Great Con­tem­po­raries, like the rest of the vol­ume, was derived from a pre­vi­ous arti­cle. In this case the orig­i­nal was “The Truth about Hitler,” in The Strand Mag­a­zine of Novem­ber 1935 (Cohen C481). Ronald Cohen notes in his Bib­li­og­ra­phy that Strand edi­tor Reeves Shaw, who paid WSC £250 for the arti­cle, want­ed Churchill to make it “as out­spo­ken as you pos­si­bly can…absolutely frank in your judg­ment of [Hitler’s] meth­ods.” It was.

Two years lat­er, when Churchill was prepar­ing his Hitler essay for Great Con­tem­po­raries, he char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly sub­mit­ted it to the For­eign Office, which asked that he tone it down.…